Beyond the trophies: Jesse Owens Museum and Memorial Park (Oakville)

Flag from the 1936 Olympics

Jesse Owens Museum and Memorial Park (Oakville)

When Jesse Owens won his gold medal in the long jump — one of four he earned in the 1936 Berlin Olympics — Adolf Hitler was watching. So was Carl R. Burt, who purchased this flag as a souvenir. It depicts the 49 nations that competed in the Olympics that year, along with two swastikas that offer a haunting reminder of the war that soon followed.

Burt’s daughter, Beth McGovney of Boise, Idaho, donated the flag to the museum along with photos that illustrate the experience of attending the “Nazi Games.” One image shows Burt and a friend traveling to Berlin as third-class passengers on the transatlantic steamship Normandie. Another features them in front of the Olympiastadion where Owens made history.

Burt’s attendance at the 1936 Olympics also is preserved in another way. Leni Riefenstahl — the notorious German filmmaker best known for the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will — chronicled the Berlin Games in the documentary Olympia. Burt appears prominently in closeups, cheering on Owens in the long jump from “seats so close to Hitler’s box, they also saw Hitler’s fury,” McGovney notes. Olympia footage also appears in Jesse Owens Returns to Berlin, a 1964 documentary recounting the champion’s achievements; the film plays regularly in the museum’s theater.